Play YouTube Videos in a Loop

If you want to play a YouTube video one more time, there's a "replay" button at the end of the video or you can press the left arrow, after focusing the video.

To automate the process and play the video in an "infinite" loop, use Loopy for YouTube, a Greasemonkey script that adds a small link below the video to start the loop. The script requires Greasemonkey , a Firefox extension, and it's efficient: it doesn't reload the page to download the video again.


There's another way to play a YouTube video in a loop - use the loop parameter of the embeddable player (here's the complete list of parameters):

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1 (replace VIDEOID with the video's ID)

If you add the autoplay parameter, the video will start to play automatically:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1&autoplay=1

Google Trends Shows Traffic Stats

Google Trends no longer displays only information about searches, now you can use it to compare the daily unique visitors for two or more sites. To see the actual numbers, you need to log in using a Google account.

It's interesting to find the sources used by Google to estimate the traffic of a web site. According to the help page, "Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. (...) Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool."

For example, Google Trends estimates that the number of daily visitors for Facebook.com is 30 million, 3 times bigger than one year ago. You can also find the countries where a site is popular, related sites and searches.


One interesting tidbit: you can't see traffic data for most Google sites, although there are some exceptions. "We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy," explained a Google spokesperson. I don't think this makes sense, as Google wouldn't release its internal traffic data, but only a rough estimation.

Google's blog for webmasters warns that the data may not be very accurate. "Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."

There are other services that show web traffic stats: Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), Alexa, but it's difficult to compare Google's data with the information provided by those services because they use different measures: daily uniques vs monthly uniques, actual numbers vs reach, worldwide visitors vs US visitors.

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

After updating the listings for electronics, Google Product Search (previously known as Froogle) integrated the data from Google's book search engine. In addition to the list of stores where you can find a certain book, Google shows a summary of the book, the table of contents, references from the web and related books. There's also a link to Google Book Search, where you can preview and search inside the book.


In other book-related news, Panlibus points to Zoomii, a great visualization for Amazon's bookstore where books are placed in virtual shelves. If the products are more tangible, people are more likely to buy them, so Google should show more visual information: images, videos, trend charts, feature comparison etc.

Search Read Items in Google Reader

One of the most useful features that is missing in Google Reader is a way to search the items you've read in the past. This is useful, since Google Reader's search results are sorted by date and it may be difficult to find an article published two years ago.

Depending on your preferred view, Google Reader defines read items differently: in the expanded view posts are marked as read when you scroll past them (this can be disabled in the settings), while in the list view you need to expand the posts. If you disable the setting that marks the posts as read automatically in the expanded view or if you use the list view, the read items will be a subset of all the posts from your subscriptions.

To see the list of posts you've read in the past, you can visit this page. But if you want to subscribe to the list, so you can easily search the read posts, these steps could help:

1. Find your user ID.
Copy this code:
javascript:prompt("User ID", _USER_ID);void(0);
Go to Google Reader, paste the code in the address bar and press Enter. You should see a long number that needs to be used later so copy it in a text editor or in your browser's search box.

2. Subscribe to your read items.
The feed for read items has a long address:
http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/USERID/state/com.google/read
Replace USERID with the number obtained in the previous step and subscribe to the feed in Google Reader (for example, type a and paste the feed's URL).

The built-in feed doesn't have options for renaming or unsubscribing, but all these options are available in Settings > Subscriptions. The default title of the feed is "(Your name)'s read items".

To search your read items, enter your query in the search box, press Tab, type the first letters from the feed's title (by default, the first letter from your name) and press Enter.



(The first screenshot features Colorful List View, a Greasemonkey script that brings some color in Google Reader if you use the list view.)

Related:
Explore your interactions with Google Reader

Update (a day later): You no longer have to subscribe to the read items feed, because Google Reader added "read items" as a restriction in the drop-down:

One Google Help Center to Rule Them All

To find some information about a Google service directly from the source, you no longer have to locate the help center for that service. The unified help center available at http://www.google.com/support lets you search across all the help information provided by Google. This could also be useful if you want to find something related to more than one service.

Behind the scenes, Google uses a custom search engine that includes 218 URL patterns. Google automatically creates an iGoogle gadget for the custom search engine so you can search directly from iGoogle.


Google has become more transparent and most services have lists of known issues and suggestions. The Toolbar help center links to videos, Google Talk's help center shows the most popular searches (among them: group chat, account locked, video chat, Linux, Mac, sign out), Gmail lists recommended articles that are sometimes related to previous queries, while Google Analytics searches many information sources, including Analytics-related blogs and discussion boards.

Better Terrain Representation in Google Maps

Mehmet K. noticed an update of the terrain layer from Google Maps, a feature that lets you view physical features, such as mountains and vegetation, with elevation shading.

The fairly recent "terrain" feature in Google Maps now plots contours as well as hill shading. The only problem that I can see is that the contours are in feet in the UK whereas feet are only really used in the States. Even in the UK where we still use miles for our roads, looking at familiar hill heights in feet is very off putting. When I looked at other countries (Kenya) the heights there were in meters.

"Contour lines are lines drawn on a map connecting points of equal elevation. If you walk along a contour line you neither gain or lose elevation." The other method used for representing terrain, "hill shading is a computer based mapping technique that shades each area of the surface to proportional to the amount of light that would be reflected off the surface from a light source at a specified location, usually to the northwest of the area of interest. Hill shading produces a planimetrically correct map that looks like a three-dimensional view of the surface."


Back in April, Google's geo blog mentioned some practical uses for these features. "Now, at a glance you can see the height of the world's peaks, or plan your next camping trip. Contour lines can even help you find a flatter bike route for your daily commute, which is key if you live in a city like Seattle."